I've also studied interaction design and service design. In my experience the conflict between what a user/designer wants and what the business wants are so completely different it's just frustrating to work in projects like that.
Getting everyone onboard every time, when they are only looking for you to solve their problem the way they want it solved is just horrible.
What happens if there's a tension between what the business wants and what the user wants, and the user's requirements are "wrong"?
I was in a design thinking training session once where we were tasked with designing a hypothetical digital wallet. We interviewed a persona who was a minimalist, and his goal in life was to buy as few things as possible in life (note: not to buy things more cheaply, but actually to avoid buying things at all). He wanted the digital wallet to help him avoid purchases.
On the face of it, his goals are admirable. But it seems to me it shouldn't be the responsibility a designer to design for those goals. The user can elect to practice his minimalism by personally opting out, but we oughtn't need to design our product around that.
Isn't design (at least commercial design) be about harmonizing the needs of business and individuals, not to necessarily to fulfill each stated need of the individual? I mean, there is a kind of design that does not account for the needs of business: it is called "art". But I don't think that's not quite what we're about.
(don't get me wrong, I'm very much against user-hostile design. But I also believe that industrial design is a balancing act between business and customers, and the task of the designer is to help resolve that tension. User-centric design leads to all kinds of abominations too. MoviePass for instance -- to use an extreme example -- was very user-centric at the expense of a sustainable business model.)
Your comment makes me think about FB's design. Astronomical compute and human power brought to bear to personalize, A-B test, contextualize and curate with the express intention of driving engagement.
In another thread, I remember someone suggesting FB's express goal was getting people addicted, and another user took issue with claiming that was a goal. I mentally sided with the OP, MAXIMUM ENGAGEMENT feels like an A-B tested way to describe driving addiction to me.
It's a shame that resources of such incomprehensible, never before seen enormity can be brought to bear for such a task, but a digital wallet that tries to subtly drive user behavior towards frugality feels intuitively bad.
Less purchases mean your data is built upon a cadre of less valuable consumers. That's bad for your digital wallet business! Not to mention it's manipulative, but then quite a bit of this business is manipulation. I wonder how I'd react if I read a news article about some company manipulating its users to be happier, more prosperous..
What if android's auto complete suggestions were trained on a corpus that promoted the kinds of responses that come from people google knows to have attained high autonomy * feedback?
Subtly manipulating people into negotiating better outcomes to their own personal tyrannies in their workplace or relationships. It would be SO WEIRD.
Facebook made the news a while ago with some salacious headline about using its powers to see if its feed could make teenagers more depressed. They concluded that they have that power.
Instinctually, my wish would be that perhaps companies shouldn't have vast dossiers on every living human -- but to even imagine turning back the clock on that feels like delusion.
Since we're all members of the panopticon anyways, couldn't my phone tell me ways I'm exemplary or special when my self esteem is low? Gah, it's gross to even contemplate, but maybe it's less gross than the current focused laser beam trying to get me to vote, buy and be angry as others wish..
My girlfriend got a design strategy MBA several years ago (her family thought it was a bullshit degree) and has worked for two of the largest companies in the U.S. (one of those jobs is still current). These companies are taking design strategy VERY seriously based on the projects I see her working on, and the outrageous salaries they’re paying her and her cohorts.
In the end, they are in the business for profit. So of course it is always just to “sell more stuff,” but in order to do that you have to fix deep-rooted problems within the company, its culture, its customers and products. She works on all those things.
If the trend continues as I’m observing it from the outside, more companies will be hiring design strategists and researchers in-house and these design consultancies will have a lot less work in the next 10 years.
